The real story is the answer Obama tried to give to Joe. Let’s say that Joe did make as much as $270,000. As Obama noted, he’d be paying an additional 3% marginal tax. That’s 3% on the excess $20,000 — not the entire $270,000. Therefore, his additional tax would be…(patience while the magic adding machine does it’s thing)….(Voila!)… $600. If he made as much as $300,000, his additional tax liability under Obama would be a ‘crushing’ $1,500.

Would anyone decline the opportunity to earn an additional $50,000, because a tax hike would raise their tax liability an additional $1,500 — from a tax of $18,000 on that excess income to a tax of $19,500?

Would you avoid growing your business because it might raise your taxes by .5%?

Funny you call him an “asswipe” for not paying his taxes, at least on time. I take it you know that he has had no financial calamities that may have severely impacted his finances and ability to pay on time? After the bailout crap from Washington, everyone should refuse to pay taxes in 2009 to protest the heretofore unequaled confiscation of individuals’ hard earned money.

You gotta love Obama’s line in the story about spreading the wealth around. It’s a nice concept when done voluntarily, which would happen without the additional Obama tax burden. The thing is, he doesn’t just want to spread it around, he wants to decide who deserves it . . .and we all know it ain’t the people working for it.

@Mike – the point is that the mythic “undecided” Joe Average who was just asking a question of Obama that the media turned into a 24-hour circus turns out to be a registered Republican and McCain supporter who was lying about buying a business (let alone worrying the tax impact) and, on top of everything, doesn’t even pay the taxes he owes. Several million Americans experience calamities of all sorts and still manage to pay their taxes on time.

You and I (and more than 8 in 10 Americans) will get tax relief from Obama’s plan. I have no idea who you think his plan is unfairly rewarding.

Classic – a voter asks a question, and instead of examining the quality of the politician’s answer, we examine the quality of the questioner.

I don’t care how much the tax liens are for, what he makes, what his real name is, or anything else. He is a voter in this country, and should be allowed to ask a question without an investigation into his affairs. And to say any personal issues for this guy is a shot in the foot for McCain is ridiculous. The guy won’t say who he’s voting for! He’s just a guy who asked a question while the camera was on! Give it up.

You and I (and more than 8 in 10 Americans) will get tax relief from Obama’s plan. I have no idea who you think his plan is unfairly rewarding.

I don’t believe in punishing success. The system is upside down. People who earn virtually nothing get an “earned income tax credit” allowing them to receive money that exceeds what they’ve paid in taxes while people who work hard get rewarded by paying higher taxes. The whole system is SICK and relies on legalized thievery.

Hey, McCain made Joe the Plumber the issue, not us. If the faltering, lumbering GOP ticket wants to make this joker the focal point, it’s only fair that we learn he’s neither “undecided” nor particularly sincere about his “question”

Whether “Joe” is “Sam”, whether he owes taxes, whether he is a Republican, the real import of the exchange between him and Obama is what Obama said–and this is what all the b.s. is aimed at obscuring.

Obama admitted, finally, that his aim is to “spread the wealth around” (his words, not “Joe’s”)–in other words, redistribution of property. It is a core belief among socialists that the goal is not to provide equal opportinity, but to guarantee equal results for all–regardless of ability or effort. Such beliefs are not shared by the majority of Americans, and the Obama thugocracy wants to make certain that the majority do not understand what their guy really wants to do.

“Spreading the wealth” was tried, and abandoned, by the Pilgrims, who experimented with communal sharing. According to William Bradford (he was Governor of Plymouth Plantation, Humanist), “This community … was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.” Men refused to “work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense; … this was thought injustice.”

Go ahead, Humorist (or should we call you “Solipsist”?), soak the rich. When people see what they’ve worked for taken away, they won’t work for it, and the whole pie gets smaller. (Not, of course, according to William Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis.)

@Ward – we tried “trickle-down” with Reagan and both Bushes, to share a more contemporary example, and we’ve been left with mountains of debt. You can call Obama’s plan socialist until you’re blue in the face, but the simple facts are that, in the past century, Democrats in the Oval Office managed federal budgets a lot better than so-called “fiscal conservative” Republican presidents.

Most people do not understand the effects (or the lack of it) of tax cuts to the rich. Their tax cuts do not re-enter the primary market where you and I buy and sell goods. As such it does not enrich the economy. A tax cut to the rich ends up in the secondary market of shares, options, futures, bonds etc. Even the super rich can only consume so much. The rest of the money gets lost in the secondary market, inaccessible to the economy where everyone else earns a living. Money from that market does not help the economy grow, and furthermore, in today’s global finance market, that tax break could easily go towards buying investments in China or East Europe or anywhere else but America!! There is no trickling down: its water tight.

The only way the money can be kept in circulation in the primary market is if somebody, usually an agent like the government, catches that money before it gets locked away. Somehow the best proponents of capitalism don’t want to talk about this phenomenon.

Your “secondary” market, where money gets “wasted”, funds gov’t bonds for roads and schools, funds bonds for companies to expand and create jobs, funds investment in private companies to do the same thing, and generally allows all of the borrowing and capital growth that it takes to run the economy. For example, Morgan Stanely Private Equity, full of “secondary” market money from terrible rich people, buys Tops, the HQ moves here, and 150 jobs are created. Some may go to other other countries, and the spoiled rich in other countries invest here.

When a school district wants to repair schools, and issues $80 million in bonds, who do you think buys them? Horrible, terrible rich people who hate the poor.

That you would rather the $$$ go directly to a consumer, through wealth redistribution, to buy food and clothes, doesn’t change the fact that huge financial markets are needed for the economy to work.

@Jim H – I completely agree how scary and intimidating the “political machine” and the complicit media can be to an average citizen:

see Cindy Sheehan
see Valerie Plame (and Joe Wilson)
see Richard Clarke
see Bethany Wilkerson and Graeme Frost (a 2 year old and 12 year old, respectively, who were smeared by the right wing noise machine because their parents had the temerity to support the reauthorization of SCHIP – State Children’s Health Insurance Program)
see Lila Lipscomb (the grief-stricken mother of a dead soldier in Fahrenheit 9/11)
see Michael Schiavo (who was accused, at various times and completely falsely, of starving his wife, beating his wife, causing his wife’s traumatic brain injury, cheating on his wife, exploiting his wife’s PVS for his own enrichment, etc)

and so on and so on….for every Joe the Plumber, I can name you 10 average citizens the Bush-Cheney cabal and their flunkies in the Fox Noise/Murdoch media/Right Wing Radio/Wingnut Blogosphere have waged all-out war on to kill the messenger.

Humanist, I wasn’t making a polical statement, per se, as I purposely said “a” machine – I will not dispute your argument, although several of the people you cited were public servants and not what I would consider “average.”

I guess the frightening part about this to me is (1) it seemed to be a random event that found its way onto youtube, and (2) the speed with which the smear has come down. As such, any one of us, given the right confluence of events, could be publically destroyed within a day, and used as an example to silence others.

“Graeme Frost (a 2 year old and 12 year old, respectively, who were smeared by the right wing noise machine because their parents had the temerity to support the reauthorization of SCHIP”

It was not a reauthorization, it was a huge expansion. No one (of any sizeable audience) smeared the kid. The Democrats held the Frost family out as an example of those the expansion was intended to help. The Frosts were already covered under the pre-expansion rules. When the Dems held them out as a prime example of what they were trying to accomplish, their opponents did due diligence and looked at their situation. I don’t recall anyone being mean to the kids, or doing anything other than suggesting that folks with a home worth a few hundred grand and two new vehicles ought to maybe reach into their own pockets before reaching into ours.

I also remember howls of outrage from the left that bloggers looked into this matter. The same people that are cheering on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, and everybody else that has piled onto this guy. Apparently, their outrage is only reserved for their own. The Frosts were recruited to be political props, this guy just asked a question.

While we’re on the subject, what negative media attention from anyone but Fox and right-o-blogs has been heaped on Cindy Sheehan, Lila Lipscombe, Plame, Wilson, and Clarke?

People complain about Fox and talk radio, but in terms of numbers, it pales in comparison to the largely left leaning media. The dems put someone in the spotlight and a dozen bloggers and a few reporters go digging and that is somehow comparable to a full scale negative media blitz by all the major players?

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

If you earn more money, than you can do more to help out the country. Seems simple to me.

It is simple, but you missed the point. All social welfare programs need to be eliminated. It is not government’s job to take care of people, except in cases of direct attack, it is the government’s job to protect individual property rights.

In his Inaugural Address on 20 January, 1961, President John F. Kennedy closed his remarks with these famous words: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

With those words, JFK, considered by many to be the most exemplary leader of the Democrat Party in the 20th Century, asked Americans to put country first, a bedrock principle of the Party until the last few decades.

However today, the current slate of Democrats have turned Jack Kennedy’s national challenge on end, essentially proclaiming, “ask what your country can do for you, not what you can do for your country.”

In 1963, Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said for all to hear, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Has his dream been realized, or have Democrat leaders divided us up into constituency groups, where we are judged by all manner of ethnicity and special interests rather than the individual and national character King envisioned?

Kennedy and King had it right, but the Democrat Party has squandered their great legacy, and betrayed us, moreover enslaving many Americans as dependant wards of the state.

What Mr. Obama obviously doesn’t get—or perhaps with his Alinsky background, simply doesn’t want to admit—is that his tax plan will actually disincentivize Mr. Wurzelbacher from ever starting his small business. Read the following quote from Mr. Obama during the debate:

“[W]hat I want to do is make sure that the plumber, the nurse, the firefighter, the teacher, the young entrepreneur who doesn’t yet have money, I want to give them a tax break now. And that requires us to make some important choices.”

Truth be told, Barack Obama is not campaigning for the vote of Joe the Plumber who wants to buy the business he loyally worked at for years. He is campaigning for the vote of Tammy the Teacher, Nancy the Nurse, and Fred the Firefighter who might not yet have saved up their own money—and whom he wants to tie to the government’s apron strings. He might as well have told him on that street in Ohio, “If only I could have gotten to you before you pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps, I could have made you government-dependent from the start—and then I could community organize every move you make.”

It is not government’s job to take care of people, except in cases of direct attack; it is the government’s job to protect individual property rights.

This is your opinion; it is not an objective Truth, it is just one of many minority opinions. You are of course welcome to hold it.

However, as you surely know, the vast majority of Americans believe that the Gvt’s responsibility is to go somewhat beyond that. Certainly, the founders of this country thought so- the Consitution would be much shorter were it not so.

Snarky, it is the truth based on the historical documents of the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The empirical evidence exists for those who try to distort the plain meaning of the Constitution. My opinion may be a minority opinion, however that has no affect on the veracity of my claims.

There is a line in the Constitution that unambiguously asserts the sole purpose of the government is to protect property rights? I’m no Constitutional Scholar, but I’m not familiar with it. I know the relatively vague language of the preamble includes gems like:

form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice,
insure domestic Tranquility,
provide for the common defense,
promote the general Welfare, and
secure the Blessings of Liberty
(to ourselves and our Posterity)

So there’s a bunch of not explicitly defending property rights and solely, at that for ya. Your holding a minority opinion isn’t what makes it wrong; it’s self-evident inaccuracy is. And that’s why it is a minority opinion. The causal arrow I’m implying is the reverse, guy.

Snarky — 5th and 14th Amendments. Identical phrase. “… life liberty or property …”.
I wouldn’t rely on the preamble for a recitation of constitutional rights, unless I’d studied at Harvard Law or clerked for W.O. Douglas.

Jim H, I agree. Although to be fair it’s partly due to McCain mentioning him so much

Yet barely any coverage on the fact that Ayers is an admitted terrorist and murderer and has all sort of close ties to Obama and ACORN
Or coverage on the fact that Dodd and Frank repeatedly worked to keep fannie mae and freddie mac from being reformed

All that said, Joe probably should have thought about his skeletons and told the McCain campaign not to use him

Joe’s skeletons don’t affect the legitimacy of the viewpoint he expressed. McCain was smart to take advantage of the exchange this guy happened into with Obama. Many people agree that a 36% federal income tax rate on job-creating “rich” business owners is already high enough and shouldn’t be raised to 39% as Obama wants to do. Sure, if Obama happened to walk by some skeleton-free person’s driveway who raised this same issue and got the same response then McCain would have been better off mentioning the skeleton-free person instead. That didn’t happen.

In the five national polls cited in RealClearPolitics.com that were conducted entirely after the Joe-Obama driveway debate on 10/14, McCain trails by an average of 4.4% (5, 4, 7, 2, 4). In the five polls conducted most previous to 10/14, McCain trailed by an average of 8.2% (9, 14, 4, 7,7). For whatever reasons, the lead seems to have reduced by about half.

You are picking and choosing your “evidence” (the enumerated powers define the meaning my ass) to suit your bias. The premble states the purpose of the document, and it says nothing whatsoever about its sole purpose being the defense of property; this is clear and you are simply wrong.